The technology blog of Neil Thompson

Over the last few days I have experienced both the good and bad sides of Microsoft Windows. My laptop runs Windows XP Pro and normally runs pretty smoothly. On Saturday I was doing some work and shut down without any problems. Next morning when I started up Windows went through all the normal process but instead of displaying the login dialog I got a message“lsass.exe failed to initialise” – very useful. I tried a few things but got no further. So off to Google for some answers and it didn’t look good. One suggestion was to replace lsass.exe from the install disk. Did that with no success. It seemed that the only thing that had worked for others was to do a reinstallation. I did that and it worked?
So why did it work and more to the point why was it necessary? Why did the laptop work on Saturday and then not on Sunday morning? Did the laptop have a bad night and woke up with a migraine? I have been in software development for over 20 years now and I am still at a loss to explain such behaviour.

On a more positive note Steve at work has pointed out a great Windows time saving tip. If you press ctrl+c on standard message boxes the text gets copied to the clipboard and not just text of the message but also the header and but the buttons too. See the example below:

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Logon Message
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Your password will expire in 6 days. Do you want to change it now?
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Yes No
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This is such a great time saving tip, especially if you work in support. Why this isn’t better know I really don’t know but now you know too.